Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Friday, August 18, 2017

It Doesn't Matter What Republicans Do or Say; The Left and the Press Will Call Them Racist Anyway

Twice a day, even a broken clock is right.

Does that mean that when a broken clock constantly crying Racism Racism Racism is, or may have been, correct
in Charlottesville, Donald Trump, as well as all other Republicans and conservatives, should praise the clock for being a masterfully constructed piece of machinery and for unfailingly telling the time correctly?

For the past 10 years or so, the members of one of the most decent and civil groups ever formed in America, and indeed in the world, was called every kind of vile name, from dirt-bags to tea baggers, with the most common being despicable racists.

All the members of the Tea Party wanted was less government, less taxes, and less bureaucrats. There was never never any threats or name-calling, never any violence at any of their gatherings, no one was ever attacked, and often they left the place of demonstration cleaner than when they found it.

When I mentioned on a French television show that I sympathized with the Tea Party, the facial reaction of the interviewer was such — Michel Field's face twitched visibly — that you would have thought that I had bragged that I was a proud card-carrying member of the Nazi Party or the Ku Klux Klan.

Do you remember what was the single very best message on a Tea Party sign?

It doesn't matter what this sign says, the press will call it racist anyway

Remember Hillary Clinton railing against the racists, the sexists, the homophobic, the xenophobic, the Islamaphobic, in short the irredeemable, those in the basket of deplorables?

That's not just Hillary Clinton.

It turns out that that is the leftists' default position.

As well as that of the press.

Their default position is to assume everyone is a deplorable, and they have been comparing every GOP politician to Hitler since — well, since the World War II era itself (as Ed Driscoll has discovered).

Should Trump have denounced the white supremacists in Charlottesville more forcefully or, earlier, by name?

It doesn't matter. He would have been called a racist whatever he said or did not say.

Moreover,
isn't the truth that the left did not, does not, want the president of
the United States (whatever his party, whatever the color of the skin)
to denounce an extremist party?

What it wanted, wants,
was a Republican to make amends for an alleged part of the GOP, thereby
"acknowledging," in so many words, that the neo-Nazis, KKK members, were
not only a main part of their coalition but that they show the true colors of all its members.

This is why you have to ask why Republicans, from Marco Rubio to Mitt Romney, are jumping in in support of leftists against Donald Trump in this matter.

First, whatever Republicans do or say, they will be called racists anyway.

Second, it is all a smokescreen by the drama queens to create melodrama and crises where (usually) none is warranted, focusing the news on the nefarious Republicans while taking it away from the cuddly Democrats (cozy Reset relations with the Kremlin for decades, election tampering, various instances of the DNC's misdeeds and malfeasance, etc etc etc)

Calling their opponents, and members of the population, names is the default position of the Left — wherever on Earth it operates.

The general population is degenerate, vile, and despicable, it must be shamed, it must be humiliated, it must be taught how to think, it must be nannied, it must be controlled. (This is why leftists think it is perfectly OK to lie to the population, whether about the doctor you most assuredly can keep or about the guns they have no intention of grabbing or about the — "flexible" — foreign affairs favoring a Russia or an Iran.)

So it is not inappropriate to remember what caused the whole Charlottesville event to degenerate: police was told to stand down, by the
city's (Democratic) mayor — except in one single case. They were told to herd
the White Supremacists through the crowd of antifa protesters railing against
them, thus creating a melodramatic crisis.

State, local, and even college campus leadership appear to be telling police to stand by
while some degree of unlawful violence takes place right before their
eyes. Yet when that violence predictably spirals out of control, the authorities profess their inability
to have done anything to stop it. Meanwhile, those inclined to violence
are emboldened, secure in the knowledge that the publicity payoff is
high and the odds of punishment low.

… [Like the conspicuous lack of police involvement at the University of California, Berkeley], CNN reported that in Charlottesville, “both sides agree that one group didn't do enough to prevent the violence
as the crowds grew and tensions flared: the police.” The organizer of
the “Unite the Right” rally complained that “police purposefully created
the catastrophe that led to a melee in the streets of Charlottesville,”
while a Black Lives Matter leader attending the counter-protest
remarked, “It's almost as if they wanted us to fight each other.”

… There is one group of people who have so far consistently benefitted
when political violence has been allowed to take place: the politicians
who lead our localities and the de facto politicians who run our
campuses. They avoid the political fallout from images of police
confronting violent protesters (who may also be their supporters), they
get to blame whichever side they like less for causing the violence, and
[they] get to pretend to fulfill their responsibility to keep people “safe” by
making it harder for controversial viewpoints to be expressed.

Likewise,
these crises and the melodramatic fairy tales, such as those about the never-ending dialogue on race, allow the nation-wide Democratic Party to avoid questions regarding far more pressing matters, such as — as seen above — cozy Reset relations with the Kremlin for decades, election tampering,
various instances of the DNC's misdeeds and malfeasance, etc etc etc…

What is galling is the hypocrisy. As I have asked before:

What is it about double standards that they do not teach at the Columbia School of Journalism?

When a Bernie Sanders supporter opened fire on Republican congressmen playing baseball, it was perfectly alright for leftist politicians to make general comments about extremist speech on both sides of the aisle.

When a Black Lives Matter supporter opened fire on Dallas policemen, killing five of them, the responsibility was not attributed to a member of the leftist, Democrat-supporting organization (not to mention the entire movement itself), but — in a speech by none other than Barack Obama — to “powerful weapons.”

no demands for the Obama administration to condemn these actions — quite
unlike how Trump is browbeaten to do so any whiff of extremism from the
Right.

Certainly, for eight years, Obama was neither blamed for any violence nor asked to condemn anyone at all — much less apologize to the nation — even when, as commander-in-chief, the man in charge of the military was responsible (the buck stops here?) for sending the armed forces to the defense of civil servants fighting Islamists in a Libyan town for 13 hours without so much as a single combat helicopter or fighting plane taking off to head in their direction.

Speaking of which: and then there is the whole Islamic terrorist attack reports (both in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world) — also known in the press as the "the motives remain mysterious" department — where the final lesson is invariably: "we must not generalize" and "we must not blame Islam for the attacks."

But with Americans, and with people in the West, there we must generalize and there we must assign blame. For the simple reason, that the whole point is to shame the population into continuing our acceptance of our more-compassionate/intelligent/tolerant-than-thou overlords as our/their masters.

The Antifa movement, in the forefront of that nauseating sympathy for
Islamism, is far more prevalent and dangerous in U.S. society than those
few pathetic remaining losers in the KKK and similar neo-Nazi groups.
The Antifa thugs are seemingly everywhere, smashing windows and making
life Hell for weak-willed university administrators across the country.

Nevertheless,
overwhelmed by this nostalgia that is, in truth, a masquerade for fear
of a gruesome reality, the almost non-existent neo-Nazis are the
boogeymen of the hour in the eyes of our friends on the left. Again,
what a convenience, because dealing with what happened in Barcelona is
surpassingly difficult. It isn't because of neo-Nazis or the KKK that
it's been decades since any of us has walked onto an airplane or entered
a concert or museum without being examined or x-rayed, that our daily
lives have not been the same. A vicious ideological war is obviously
being waged against the West and its liberties with its end nowhere near
in sight. As ISIS wrote of the Spanish terror, "We will recover our land from the invaders." Like the Nazis of old, they mean it.

As it happens, the view that the white supremacists and the antifa thugs are opposing forces may turn out to be fiction. James Robbins points out in USA Today that

During the Weimar Republic period in Germany, Nazis and Communists
fought in the streets, yet both regarded the established order as their
enemy. Hence the Weimar-era adage that a Nazi was like a beefsteak, brown on the outside and red on the inside.

… Today’s right and left wing violent radicals are from the same mold. … Everyone understands that the neo-Nazi and KKK groups are composed of violent extremists. The apparent blind spot is with the anarchist/socialist far left, which is puzzling given recent history.

… The proper response is not to condemn one group of radicals over another
but to see all of them as a direct threat to constitutional government.
The real contest is between the vast, law-abiding majority of
democratic citizens and these small groups of twisted violent losers
parading in the streets with weapons, wearing masks, throwing cement-filled soda cans. Take your pick, you can have the extremists or you can have the Constitution, you can’t have both.

Donald Trump’s position is that both are hate groups, and both are
quick to resort to violence to further their political goals, and that
putting them together like that was surely going to stir up violence.

Personally, I think Trump is somewhat understating the case. White
supremacists are exceedingly rare, even if they’ve received a shot in
the arm from SJWs harping on white people all the time (hint: that tends
to manufacture more supremacists, not less). What happened in Virginia
may very well represent peak white supremacism, the very most such
groups are capable of. Antifa and militant Marxists, meanwhile, enjoy
far greater support from media, financiers (oh, the irony), and
society-at-large. Antifa dwarfs Klansman and Neo-Nazis. Militant
Marxists are, by far, the greater threat currently.

But that being said, Trump did put his finger on the central point:
both groups espouse violent ideologies that are incompatible with
freedom.

[But it] is easy to denounce white supremacists, who probably represent less than a tenth of a percent of the population.

What we really saw in Charlottesville was two far-left groups having at
each other because neither will countenance a competitor.

Yes, some of the demonstrators carried Nazi flags, just as some of the
counter-demos carried hammer-and-sickle Soviet flags. In fact, those
flags are almost interchangeable. Everyone knows and acknowledges that
Soviet Communism was based on Marxism, hence Marxism and its spawn today
are "Left," but everyone also apparently thinks that Fascism and Nazism
apparently just sprang up out of thin air with no relation to political
theories and contexts that came before, and that Fascism and Nazism
were and are "Right."

Untrue. Both Fascism and Nazism were founded on Marxist theory and
belonged firmly on the Left side of the spectrum, according to their
founders.

Kevin Williamson brings it back to the point of view of the Liberals and the Democrats:

The current attack on Confederate monuments is only another front
in the Left’s endless kulturkampf. The Left is committed to always being
on the offense in the culture wars, and, with Donald Trump and his
white-resentment politics installed in the White House and Republicans
lined up queasily behind him, the choice of going after Confederate
totems is clever. It brings out the kooks and the cranks, and some
respectable conservatives feel obliged to defend them. Getting
Republicans to relitigate the Civil War is a great victory for the
Democrats, who were, after all, on the wrong side of it as a matter of
historical fact.

… We should not, in any case, accept the fiction that what is
transpiring at the moment is a moral crusade rather than political
opportunism.

… those monuments … were not always put up for good reasons, but the
conquering North indulged Southern jealousy of Southern honor for a
pretty good reason: the desire for peace. The Civil War had been brutal,
and the South was — this part of the story is not as widely understood
as it should be — desperately poor, and remained essentially a Third
World country within the United States until the post-war era. No sense
poking them for no good reason.

… National panics over Confederate revanchism, like New York Times
crusades against homelessness, tend to coincide with Republican
presidencies. That is not coincidence.

The war on statuary serves two purposes: The first is to humiliate
Southerners in retribution for their support of Republican politicians
and conservative causes, particularly religious and social causes. The
second is to help Democrats win elections without white men. … Keeping non-whites in a state of panic and agitation is necessary to Democrats’ political aspirations.

By the way, isn't there one thing that we can thank the Left and the
antifa thugs for? For helping to explain why the Founding Fathers
insisted on the Second Amendment…

The Democrats’ motives here are tawdry and self-serving, for the
most part. As cheap and silly as Southern sentimentality can be, the
desire to reduce and humiliate one’s fellow citizens is distasteful. We
would all do better to take Abraham Lincoln’s advice: “We are not
enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” Friends overlook one
another’s little vices.